President Barack Obama believes in the public sector. He thinks it should be made ever more expansive and entrusted with ever more complicated tasks. Its unions should be powerful. It should be hailed by all the great and good, and attract the nation's best and brightest.

This is how the president portrays the public sector at a level of glittering generality. Then there's the reality of government too big for him to monitor, the workings of which he learns about only when he reads the newspapers and watches TV. There's the incompetence, the dishonesty and the self-justification. There's the unfairness and the obtuseness, all exemplified in the Internal Revenue Service scandal.

The innocent explanation of the affair is that the IRS' Cincinnati office was so poorly run, it couldn't manage to stop itself from discriminating against tea party organizations applying for 501(c)(4) status — for years.

As it happens, the recent reporting on the Cincinnati office portrays a dreary backwater with all the élan of your local Department of Motor Vehicles. But not discriminating against organizations shouldn't be overly difficult.

According to Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS's tax-exempt organizations division and the poster-bureaucrat for the scandal, there was a flood of applications for 501(c)(4)s that necessitated the “centralization” of the cases. The targeting of the tea-party groups wasn't targeting at all, but an efficiency measure gone awry.

In fact, The Washington Post notes that the number of applications barely ticked up from 2009 to 2010, when the practice of selecting tea party groups began.

IRS functionaries still don't think that they did anything wrong, in the sense that everyone else would understand it. Lerner maintains that the IRS workers “didn't have the appropriate level of sensitivity about how this might appear to others, and it was just wrong.” But stringing along organizations from one side of the ideological spectrum, while quickly approving groups from the other, isn't an appearance problem, it's a real problem.

Ousted acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller told Congress that the agency was guilty of “horrible customer service,” which makes it sound like it delivered pizzas to the wrong address or failed to honor advertised discounts on merchandise.

The IRS didn't have to wait for the outcome of any inspector-general report. It already knew it was guilty. It could have exposed its wrongdoing at any time, and thus ensured a stop would be put to it immediately through the blunt force of public outrage.

We are supposed to believe that IRS officials bungled at everything except keeping the agency's own misconduct under wraps for as long as possible. They were ham-handed at everything except planting a question at an American Bar Association conference so Lerner could pre-empt the inspector general's report — and do it, in classic Washington fashion, on a Friday the day before its release.

President Obama has a dream of what the public sector represents. In his rhetoric, it is a shining expression of our togetherness. He might want to acquaint himself with the actual government over which he presides from such an Olympian distance, and adjust his enthusiasm accordingly.